Like many in the news industry, The Atlantic is seeing its referrals from Google drop. At the same time, CEO Nicholas Thompson said, the number of subscribers The Atlantic gets from Google traffic has gone up.
“Google is sending us fewer people who aren’t going to subscribe,” Thompson said in an interview with longtime media journalist Peter Kafka. On the Friday episode of Channels, Thompson answered questions as the CEO of a profitable media company — and as a news creator himself.
Thompson has 1.6 million followers on LinkedIn and about 6,500 on YouTube. His videos and podcasts are produced independently of The Atlantic’s editorial team but provide revenue that gets reinvested into the newsroom. (The latest episode of The Most Interesting Thing in AI is sponsored by PwC.)
The Atlantic currently has 1.6 million paid subscribers, Thompson said. The magazine reported a profit in 2024 and has been in the black since.
Other tidbits from the hour-long interview:
The Atlantic is getting micropayments from AI startup Parallel Web Systems, Thompson said. The startup — founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal — is building web search infrastructure for AI agents (rather than humans). Most AI deals involve fixed-fee licensing but Parallel’s Index platform compensates news companies under a different rubric.
“Rather than paying only for content access, crawls, or citations,” Index pays more for “content that is uniquely valuable, hard to replace, or used in high-value agent work.”
Thompson on the boundaries The Atlantic put in place when becoming one of the first news companies to sign with OpenAI back in 2024:
I prefer them paying us than not paying us, right? And many of the AI companies don’t pay. We set up a whole bunch of boundaries in the contract: How much can you summarize? Can you quote an author? Can you try to get your model to write like an author? These things we care about because we want it to be harder for AI to replace what we do.
Thompson said it’s been “a surprise” how little traffic is directed back to The Atlantic from ChatGPT.
He said the news org would be willing to resign a deal with OpenAI as long as there is “a fair exchange of value.”
“What are you giving us, and what are we giving you? Is it fair?” Thompson said. “And if it’s not, well, then we’ll block you from the site, or we’ll sue you, right? That’s the deal.”
A few years back, The Atlantic made a play for Substack-like newsletter subscribers. Thompson concluded the revenue-sharing experiment “didn’t work,” though he’s pleased some of the recruited authors — such as Tom Nichols and Charlie Warzel — have stuck around as regular Atlantic contributors.
“Maybe we didn’t set the numbers right,” he said. “Maybe the writers we recruited in weren’t right for that model.”
You can listen to the full Channels episode on Spotify or wherever you like to hit play on podcasts.
